Loosing and Forgetting
by MeleeQ
Summary: Sometimes we forget because it hurts to remember.


AUTHOR'S NOTES: I've always loved Susan, and I felt particularly sorry for her at the end of The Last Battle. Why was it Susan who forgot? She didn't seem to believe in Narnia any less than the others, so why her? It was begging for some angsty introspection. It could probably do with an edit, but I'm lazy. Be gentle please :P

I own nothing.

* * *

Susan had always been cautious about everything. 

When they were all at school, she was the girl afraid to climb to the very top of the tree in the yard. She was always terrified that the branches were too thin, that they would break under her and send her tumbling down to the ground below. She stayed on the lower branches, the thick ones where she knew it was safe.

And then there was Narnia. Nobody had been more surprised than Susan when the four of them had stepped out of an ordinary wardrobe into Lucy's wood. But she was apprehensive too. She was cautious, as she had always been. But then everything happened. She held a great bow in her hands and, for the first time in her life, she wasn't quite so afraid anymore. All of a sudden, she felt as though she didn't need to be cautious there, in that world. And she held onto that feeling.

As the years passed, they all gradually forgot that they had lived anywhere else except Narnia, but it was Susan who forgot the most, far quicker than anyone else did. Occasionally, Peter or Edmund or Lucy would say something. Su, do you remember back in London when... But she didn't. She would look at them in honest confusion and ask what they were talking about. At first they were surprised, but then they got used to it, and then they forgot as well. Narnia became all that Susan knew. She grew and made friends and loved... She was happier there than she had ever been, and her old cautions and fears melted away. 

Then came the hunt.

When the message came that the White Stag had been spotted, Peter was particularly excited... but for the first time in years Susan felt cautious. She ought to have been sharing the excitement of the others, but she couldn't shake the sense of foreboding in her heart. When they spotted the tree of iron, the feeling returned, this time accompanied by the same sort of sickness she felt the day Lucy had gone missing during a sea voyage, before the steersman found her asleep in the crow's nest. The others mentioned a queer feeling too (whether it was the same as her own she never determined), and Susan immediately suggested that they turn back. Back to Cair Paravel, away from this feeling she didn't like. But the others insisted they press on, so she followed. And they all tumbled out of the door of a wardrobe and everything was gone.

For a moment, Susan didn't know what had happened. Then it all came rushing back to her in a flood of memory. She looked at herself, her hands, her cloths... she was twelve again. It was then that Susan wanted to scream, to cry, to run, to do anything to get away from it all. This was not what she wanted, this was not who she was. She was twenty-seven, not twelve. This place was not her home, and she couldn't bear it.

But she had to bear it . The wardrobe would not let her back through, no matter how many times she tried or how hard she pounded on the back. When Professor Kirk told them they might get back to Narnia by another route, hope swelled within her, and she resolved that she would make it through this dull world if only in the hope of seeing Narnia again somehow. And she held up surprisingly well.

Then they did get back, and it was that which broke Susan's heart. It was Narnia, but not _her_ Narnia. Everything that she'd known was in ruins, everyone she'd loved was dead. And it hurt. It hurt worse than anything, thinking of the years of life she'd missed there. If only they'd listened to her in the wood then, if only they'd gone back... but they hadn't, and it was all gone. When Aslan came, Susan was the last to see him, which only made the hurt deeper.

But worst of all was when Aslan told her she would never come back.

And then she was sad... but she was also something that she very rarely was; Susan was angry. She was angry at her brothers and her sister for dragging her out of Narnia in the first place, she was angry with Aslan for barring her from it forever, she was angry with the world and at fate for tearing her life away from her. When they had all gotten on their trains back to school, Susan waited until Lucy fell asleep against her suitcase before leaning against the window and crying until her voice was horse and her cheeks were numb.

Susan was never quite the same after that. She still looked like Susan and acted like Susan, but she simply wasn't the Susan everyone knew before. She never talked about Narnia anymore. The others did, and Susan didn't know how they managed it. They spoke happily of their memories, but every time Susan thought of her room at Cair Paravel or her horse or that man she'd met at the ball it tore at her, ripping away at her insides. So she didn't think about it. She pushed it all out of her head, and whenever any of the others started talking about it she snapped at them. Why were they allowed to be happy when she wasn't?

And so Susan grew and changed and, just as she had wanted to when she stumbled out of the wardrobe fifteen years younger than she should've been, she ran. Her body stayed in the same place, growing, changing in ways so familiar that they bored her, but the rest of her got as far away as it could from Queen Susan the Gentle... away from everything that hurt.

* * *

Susan heard of the railway accident on the radio news. Terrible, all those people dying. She realized Lucy and Edmund and Peter were supposed to arrive home tomorrow (or was it today? Susan hadn't been paying much attention when they told her), and she wondered briefly if the accident would delay their train at all. She hoped they weren't still all angry with her.

I really must apologize to them, she thought as she went to bed that evening, I did say some rather beastly things to Lucy before they left. But I do wonder why they harp on so much about those silly games...

Susan didn't know why, but just before she drifted to sleep, somewhere deep in her heart, she felt a tiny pang of sadness.


End file.
